jetkins writes: As the owner of my own mail domain, I have the luxury of being able to create unique email addresses to use when registering with web sites and providers. So when I started to receive virus-infected emails recently, at an address that I created exclusively for use with a well-known provider of tools for the Systems Administration community (and which I have never used anywhere else), I knew immediately that either their systems or their subscriber list had been compromised.

I passed my concerns on to a couple of their employees whom I know socially, and they informed me that they had passed it up the food chain, but I have never received any sort of official response, nor seen any public notification or acceptance of this situation.

When I received another virus-infected email at that same address this week, I posted a polite note on their Facebook page. Again, nothing.

If it was a company in any other field, I might expect this degree of nonchalance, but given the fact that this company is staffed by — and primarily services — geeks, I'm a little taken aback by their apparent reticence.

So, since the polite, behind-the-scenes approach appears to have no effect, I now throw it out to the group consciousness: Am I being paranoid, or are these folks being unreasonable in refusing to accept or even acknowledge that a problem might exist? What would you recommend as my next course of action?

Once the spammers get an e-mail address, it will NEVER get removed. Their lists just grow like a giant katamari ball. All you can do is change it regularly or whitelist where it can receive mail from.

All it takes is one idiot with an infected machine, his (or her) Outlook address book (with names added automatically on receipt) gets snarfed and uploaded to a spammer, and then it gets shared between the spammers like an STD.